Adblock Plus finds the end-game of its business model: Selling ads

Eyeo GmbH, the company that makes the
popular Adblock Plus software, will today start selling the very thing
many of its users hate—advertisements. Today, the company is launching a self-service platform to sell "pre-whitelisted" ads
that meet its "acceptable ads" criteria. The new system will let online
publishers drag and drop advertisements that meet Eyeo's expectations
for size and labeling.

"The Acceptable Ads Platformhelps
publishers who want to show an alternative, nonintrusive ad experience
to users with ad blockers by providing them with a tool that lets them
implement Acceptable Ads themselves,” said Till Faida, co-founder of
Adblock Plus.

Publishers who place the ads will do so
knowing that they won't be blocked by most of the 100 million Adblock
Plus users. The software extension's default setting allows for
"acceptable ads" to be shown, and more than 90 percent of its users
don't change that default setting.

Eyeo started its "acceptable ads" program in
2011. With the new platform, it hopes to automate and scale up a process
that until now has been a cumbersome negotiation. What once could take
weeks, the company boasts in today's statement, now "takes only
seconds."

The company has a list of criteria for what makes an ad acceptable,
including size and placement limitations. Most acceptable ads are
simple text, but Eyeo says images "may qualify as acceptable, according
to an evaluation of their unobtrusiveness based on their integration on
the webpage." The acceptable ads system also provides Eyeo with its main
revenue source. Large companies that use its white-listing system must
pay a cut of the revenue they earn on those ads to Eyeo.

"We’ve been waiting years for the ad-tech
industry to do something consumer-friendly like this, so finally we got
tired of waiting and decided to just do it ourselves," said Faida.

Ad-blocking software is increasingly
widespread, but it continues to rankle publishers, who resist the notion
that Adblock Plus should get paid for white-listing ads. It's been
clear for some time that if ad-blocking companies want to start selling
ads, the technology is there. Earlier this year, Adblock showed its users Amnesty International ads promoting free speech—in the same spaces it had removed ads chosen by the publisher. (Adblock and Adblock Plus are different products.)

"It does blur the line," said Ben Williams, head of operations for Adblock Plus, at the time.

A 2015 study by PageFair and Adobe
found that 16 percent of the US online population blocked ads, while 21
percent blocked ads in the UK. In several European countries, rates of
ad-blocking topped 25 percent.